She shows up in my dreams sometimes.
Not as a ghost. As herself. The version of me at thirty-two or thirty-five who is in the middle of something and has not yet made it out the other side and does not know there is another side and is doing what she knows how to do, which is keep going, keep going, keep going, because stopping has never been offered to her as an option and she has never thought to offer it to herself.
I want to sit down with her.
Not to warn her. I have thought about warning her and I have decided against it, because the things she is about to go through made her into the person I am, and I am, on most days, glad to be the person I am, which means I cannot in good conscience ask for the things to be removed, can only ask for her to be held a little more gently inside them. Not to warn her. To sit down with her and say: you are going to make it through. That is all. Not the details, not the map, just the fact of the making-it-through, which is the thing she cannot see from where she is standing and which would change the quality of the going through if she knew it.
You are going to make it through.
The contract years and the burnout and the year the contract did not come and the sitting in the parking lot doing the math on the phone. The things that happened in rooms that called themselves collegial and were not. The slow accumulation of a worth that kept being measured and found lacking by metrics that were designed to find it lacking. The grief of a career that gave so much and withheld so much simultaneously, that required her to love the work in order to survive it and punished her for loving it, and she loved it anyway, she always loved it, that is the thing no one will ever be able to take from her.
She is going to sit at the edge of a sea one February and remember who she is underneath all of it.
She is going to write it down. She is going to give it to people who need it. She is going to become, slowly and imperfectly and at considerable cost, the woman I am now, who is not finished becoming but is no longer afraid of the becoming.
I would tell her that. If I could sit down with her. I would say all of that and then I would say: now go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow is still going to ask you for everything and you are going to give it and it is going to be worth it and you are going to be okay.
Go home. Get some sleep.
